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Letting the White House Walk?: msg#00553
culture.discuss.cia-drugs
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Letting the White House Walk? |
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/102905.html
Letting the White House Walk?
By Robert Parry
October 30, 2005
As an outsider to Washington, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald
appears to have misunderstood the finer points of how national security
classifications work when a secret is as discrete – and sensitive – as
the identity of an undercover CIA officer.
In his five-count indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of
staff I. Lewis Libby, prosecutor Fitzgerald leaves the false impression
that it was all right for White House officials with security
clearances to be discussing the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame,
a counter-proliferation official under deep cover.
Under the rules of classification, however, to see such secrets an
official must not only have a top-secret clearance but also special
code-word clearance that grants access to a specific compartment
governed by strict need-to-know requirements.
In both the Libby indictment and a hour-long press conference on Oct.
28, Fitzgerald showed no indication he understood how extraordinary it
was for White House officials to be bandying about the name of a covert
CIA officer based on the flimsy rationale that she was married to an
ex-diplomat who had been sent on a fact-finding trip to Niger.
Fitzgerald, who is the U.S. Attorney in Chicago, appears to have bought
into the notion that government officials had a right to discuss
Plame’s covert status among themselves as long as they didn’t pass the
secret on to journalists. Then Fitzgerald didn’t even seek punishment
for that, limiting his criminal case to Libby’s lying about how and
when he learned of Plame’s identity.
But to veterans of U.S. intelligence, one of the ugliest parts of
Plame’s outing was the cavalier manner in which White House officials
tossed around references to her CIA job to undercut her husband, former
U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for criticizing George W. Bush’s case
for war with Iraq.
Sensitive Secrets
Within the U.S. government, few secrets are more sensitive than the
identity of a CIA officer under “non-official cover,” or NOC, meaning
the agent operates outside government protection, such as posing as a
business executive as Plame did. Lacking diplomatic cover, a NOC faces
a far greater chance of execution if caught spying.
“The CIA is obsessive about protecting its NOCs,” one angry former
senior U.S. official told me after Libby was charged only with perjury,
false statements and obstruction of justice. “There’s almost nothing
they care about more.”
Fitzgerald did leave open the possibility there might be more charges
against other officials but said he had completed the “substantial
bulk” of his investigation. He also discouraged speculation that major
new revelations were ahead and even skirted questions about whether an
underlying crime had occurred in leaking Plame’s identity.
Some Americans, especially Iraq War critics, were deflated by
Fitzgerald’s insistence that he would prosecute only clearly defined
crimes stemming from the Plame case, not venture into a fuller
narrative about the Bush administration’s justifications for war.
Administration officials are not entirely out of hot water, however,
because new disclosures could emerge from Libby’s trial or from
additional indictments that Fitzgerald might seek before he wraps up
his investigation. According to press accounts, Bush’s top political
adviser Karl Rove remains under investigation for his role in leaking
Plame’s identity to journalists.
In one of the most mysterious revelations about Fitzgerald’s hectic
activities on Oct. 28, the day of the Libby indictment, was the New
York Times report that the special prosecutor made an unexplained visit
to the office of James Sharp, President Bush’s personal lawyer. [NYT,
Oct. 29, 2005]
Niger’s Uranium
The Wilson-Plame case goes back to 2002 when Vice President Cheney
expressed interest in a dubious report about Iraq seeking processed
uranium from Africa. In response, CIA officials who worked with Plame
decided to send Wilson to Niger to check out the reports.
Wilson, who had served as a diplomat in both Iraq and Africa, returned
with the conclusion that the reports were most likely untrue. (The
Niger allegations were later debunked by U.N. investigators.)
However, in the State of Union address in January 2003, Bush cited the
Niger allegations as part of his rationale for war with Iraq. Bush
ordered the invasion of Iraq two months later, but U.S. forces failed
to discover any stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction or evidence
of an active Iraqi nuclear program.
By spring 2003, Wilson began talking privately to journalists about his
Niger findings and criticizing the administration for hyping the WMD
intelligence. Behind the scenes, the White House began to hit back,
collecting information about Wilson and his trip.
Vice President Cheney and other White House officials soon learned that
Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA on counter-proliferation issues and had
a minor hand in arranging Wilson’s trip to Africa.
White House officials then began what appears to have been an organized
campaign to leak the identity of Wilson’s wife, presumably to suggest
that nepotism was involved in the Niger trip or to cast doubt on
Wilson’s manliness.
The anti-Wilson campaign gained momentum after he penned an Op-Ed piece
in the New York Times on July 6, 2003, accusing the administration of
having “twisted” the WMD intelligence, including the Niger allegations,
to justify war with Iraq.
Eight days later, on July 14, 2003, right-wing pundit Robert Novak
outed Plame in a column that cited two administration sources
describing Plame as a “CIA operative.”
Privately, some administration officials acknowledged that the Plame
disclosure was an act of retaliation against Wilson for being one of
the first mainstream public figures to challenge Bush on the WMD
intelligence.
In September 2003, a White House official told the Washington Post that
at least six reporters had been informed about Plame before Novak’s
column. The official said the disclosure was “purely and simply out of
revenge.”
Damaging Exposure
In indicting Libby on five counts of making false statements, perjury
and obstructing justice, Fitzgerald added a few new details to the
overall story and confirmed some facts that had appeared in press
accounts.
The indictment alleged that Libby – who also served as a national
security aide to President Bush – learned of Plame’s identity from a
CIA official and from Vice President Cheney, before passing the
information to at least two journalists, New York Times reporter Judith
Miller and Time correspondent Matthew Cooper.
When the leak investigation began, Libby concocted a false tale,
claiming that he had first learned of Plame’s identity from NBC’s
Washington bureau chief Tim Russert and had simply recycled the rumor
to reporters, the indictment said. In reality, the indictment said,
Plame never came up in the Russert-Libby conversation.
While denouncing Libby’s alleged deceptions as a serious crime,
Fitzgerald splashed cold water on the notion that his investigation
might unravel a larger government conspiracy into how not only Plame
was exposed but also the company that provided her cover and possibly
other agents who assisted her in tracking down sources of WMD.
The limited scope of the Libby indictment buoyed some conservatives,
including former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova, who pounced on its
narrow construction as a sign of White House vindication.
Meanwhile, other Republicans made clear that while they would spare
Fitzgerald from a public-relations counter-offensive, they would
continue their long-running campaign to disparage Wilson.
Because of his criticism of Bush’s use of WMD intelligence, Wilson –
who is now just a private citizen – has become a bete noire for
Republicans, on par with their hatred for the French, the United
Nations or filmmaker Michael Moore.
Three months ago, the Republican National Committee even posted an
article entitled “Joe Wilson’s Top Ten Worst Inaccuracies and
Misstatements,” which itself used glaring inaccuracies and
misstatements to discredit Wilson. [For details, see
Consortiumnews.com’s “Novak Recycles Gannon on ‘Plame-gate.’”]
However, what upsets some Americans most about Fitzgerald’s narrow
indictment of Libby is that it seems to have let other participants in
the Plame leak off the hook.
The larger conspiracy – to punish an Iraq War critic for telling the
truth about false intelligence used to take the United States to war –
will go unpunished and unexplained, at least for now.
In street terms, it looks a lot like the White House got a walk.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy &
Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be
ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com,
as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press &
'Project Truth.'
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